A South Korean state laboratory said Tuesday that it has developed a commercially viable carbon capture system using industrial waste heat that can help power plants cut back on greenhouse gas emissions.

   The Korea Institute of Machinery and Materials (KIMM) said that the "oxyfuel combustion" system can effectively capture carbon dioxide (CO2) gases released through the burning of fossil fuels to make electricity.

   "The indigenous technology can minimize the drop in efficiency associated with the carbon capture and sequestration process that has prevented power plants from adopting similar systems in the past," the laboratory said.

   A normal gas-turbine power plant has an energy efficiency of around 57 percent of input, but incorporating a carbon capture system into the generation process causes numbers to fall to 43-45 percent levels.

   Tests using the new system have shown efficiency rising to over 50 percent, which experts say is the minimum needed for the carbon capture system to be commercially viable, KIMM said.

   "In certain ideal cases efficiency reached as high as 70 percent by making maximum use of heat waste and steam that is currently discarded," it said.

   KIMM, based in Daejeon, 164 kilometers south of Seoul, said that it has designed and built a small pilot plant used to carry out actual tests, with plans under way to build a larger facility in the second half of this year.

   The pilot plant is designed to capture CO2 from a 50 kilowatt power generation unit, with the next system to have a capacity of up to 1 megawatts. This is much smaller than the 450 megawatt power generation output of most commercial power plants.

   The technology is still being updated, but it gives South Korea a chance to compete with other markets such as the United States and European Union that are working on oxyfuel combustion and other greenhouse gas reduction systems to stem global warming, the laboratory said.

Source: Yonhap News (March 8, 2011)